The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center is pleased to share the following program from the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center:

Program:  “We Were Strangers: The Story of Magda Preiss”

Date:        Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Time:        8:00 PM ET

Platform:  This program will take place online.

Please note, registration is required. Please click here to register.

We Were Strangers is the true story of Magda Preiss, a breathtaking masterpiece of Holocaust literature, composed in her own words upon arriving in America in the 1940s. Lived and told by a beautiful young bride with fearless defiance, Magda’s harrowing experience reveals a character who is larger than life and death. Hers is a love story more complex than any happy-ever-after tale. It recounts the love of culture, beauty, and life itself that fueled Magda’s will to survive; the love for her husband that made her stay to face Nazi horror instead of escaping with her parents and siblings; and her love for strangers, whose humanity amidst the most inhumane circumstances illuminates every page through Magda’s heroic voice.

From an idyllic childhood in Czechoslovakia through the hells of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and Beendorf, Magda shows what it means to be a stranger at home and in foreign lands, to be estranged from loved ones and even from oneself as the world goes insane. In devastating sentences as sharp as barbed wire, Magda uncovers universal truths about her experience as a woman in the Holocaust.

Editor AJ Greenberg will moderate the discussion.

Click here to buy We Were Strangers from the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center Online Shop.